The Strange Medieval Belief That a Dead Body Could Accuse Its Murderer

Modern forensic and criminal science uses all kinds of methods to track down those responsible for crimes, from good old-fashioned fingerprint dusting to cutting-edge DNA profiling. 

It wasn’t all that long ago, though, that crime-solving relied on some far older, far less reliable, and far more spurious techniques for identifying potential culprits—and perhaps among the most spurious of all was the belief that a murder victim’s body could, long after death, still respond to and effectively accuse its murderer. 

Where The Idea That Corpses Could Make Accusations Comes From

Taking its name from a Latin word meaning “stained with blood,” cruentation (also known as bier-right, or the “ordeal of the bier,” after the wagon that carries a coffin to a funeral) was a long-held understanding that a victim’s body would begin to ooze blood from its eyes, nose, or any other openings—or else produce blood from any knife wounds or injuries—when it was brought into the presence of its killer. 

Precisely where this idea emerged from is something of a mystery, but it certainly seems to have been an ancient one: the near 1,000-year-old Germanic epic poem Nibelungenlied features a scene in which the legendary Siegfried’s body is set down on a funeral bier, and begins to gush with blood when his killer, Hagen, approaches it. 

The use of cruentation as a plot point in the Nibelungenlied suggests that the basic idea behind this belief may perhaps have emerged in early medieval times among the ancient peoples of north-central Europe, but without any further evidence, its precise origins are somewhat lost to the mists of time. 

By the later medieval period and the early Middle Ages, however, from around the 12th century onwards, cruentation established itself as a perfectly reasonable—and, in an increasingly Christianized Europe, heaven-sent—means for proving a person’s guilt in cases like this. 

How Cruentation Worked

Typically, a victim’s body would be brought into a courtroom on a bier, where (so long as the body hadn’t already started to show signs of producing blood or fluid) the accused was made to lay their hands on it. Any oozing or similar response witnessed by the court in the body was thereby deemed to be miraculous God-given proof of the accused’s guilt, which could then scarcely be further argued against. 

Of course, we know enough about forensic science and the act of death today to understand that the likelihood of a long-dead body being able to gush forth with fresh blood (or indeed any bodily fluid) is fairly slim. After death, the body’s heart stops beating and the blood in our veins gradually stops moving, causing the familiar paleness or “pallor mortis” of a deceased person’s skin.

The blood then slowly clots and coagulates across the entire body, leaving no fresh flowing blood behind. But if scientific fact says there would be no blood left to bleed after death, what exactly were these medieval crime-solvers seeing? 

What Was Actually Happening Here?

Well, at least one suggestion is that cruentation might have emerged from tales of a post-mortem process known as purging. As gases naturally build up inside the body after death, the corpse can begin to swell and blister, causing any decomposing soft tissue to seep out or “purge” from any nearby orifices or open wounds. 

Far from seeing fresh blood exiting the victim’s body, ultimately, these early investigators might simply have been witnessing one of the earliest (and decidedly ickiest) stages of natural decomposition, and were simply (and wrongly) interpreting it as a sign of guilt. 

As flawed as the thinking behind cruentation might ultimately have been, incredibly it remained a well-considered means of assessing a potential murderer’s guilt in court for several hundred years; although Europe gradually became wiser to forensic matters and abandoned cruentation in the 1700s, there are reports from as late as 1869 of this technique still being utilized in the United States.

Thankfully, forensic science the world over has now improved sufficiently to see this bizarre and superstitious technique now long since left by the legal wayside, and so today cruentation remains little more than a peculiar footnote in forensic history—and a fairly disgusting one at that.

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